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A 19-year-old woman took her own life two weeks ago, jumping from a downtown river bridge with two police officers ten feet away. Her body hasn't been found, and neither law enforcement nor rescue personnel have looked for it.

It is an unanswerable question posed by the parents of Ayawk William: Why?

They said the 19-year-old was set to start classes at Drake next week, but early on Jan. 10, William was standing on the downtown bridge over the Center Street Dam.

When two officers walked toward her, she jumped and broke through ice that has since melted, and went over the dam.

“So the police were standing right there when my daughter jumped in the water, he knows exactly which spot she was in, right at that moment, why he don't call for helicopter or divers or anything - at least try first,” said Achol Amum, William’s mother.

“Who knows where it's going to end up. It's a lot of area, and very cold water temperatures right now to be searching for a maybe,” said Sgt. Jason Halifax with the Des Moines Police Department.

An old saying in risk management that is used by police and fire personnel, is, “Do not risk a lot to save a little.”

“While we're not unsympathetic to the family's desire to get their daughter's body back, it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to risk officers to recover a dead body,” Halifax said.

From past experience, police know the body likely was caught in the powerful boil under the dam where water spins like a washing machine.

A part of the river no one could dive in to even attempt a rescue. From there, bodies in the past are typically found by passersby days, weeks or even months later, sometimes miles downstream.

“What the police tell me, we are just in a dead end. We can't do anything,” said Jino William, William’s father.

The family told KCCI’s Mark Tauscheck they are ready to look for private companies that might help search.

Halifax said he is not aware of any time divers were sent in to the downtown rivers to look for a suicide victim's body that they could not immediately see.